Ever wonder how that famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline appeared on the Chicago Tribune in 1948, held aloft by a smiling -- and victorious -- Harry Truman?

Polling technology, that's how. According to Craig Silverman's article on the subject, conventional wisdom, supported by polls, "was almost unanimous that a Dewey presidency was inevitable, and that the New York governor would win the election handily."

And how did the pollsters get it so wrong? They used the telephone to conduct their polls. Therefore they spoke with a disproportionate number of the relatively well-to-do, who could afford the technology. In other words, a cell phone poll would have predicted Democrat Martha Coakley defeating Republican Scott Brown for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts.

A recent piece in Salon noted that pollsters are now calling mobile phones. Telephones are ubiquitous in American society today, of course, so phone surveys are much more accurate. But calling cellphones raises many of the same problems pollsters had in 1948, as Salon notes:

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South Africa's Parmalat is a producer and distributor of milk and mainstream dairy products with annual revenues of over $4 billion. It operates in over twelve countries across the world and employs over 14,000 staff.

Operating in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry, defined as "the things you buy on a regular basis at places like your local supermarket," Parmalat's latency and congestion issues experienced over the WAN needed to be addressed.

Igshaan Jackson, IT Infrastructure Manager at Parmalat SA, said "In our business, we run a centralized ERP system, centralized reporting and rely heavily on bandwidth for all our day- to-day operations. We needed the capacity to ensure our business operations could run as smoothly as possible." 

Jackson and his team chose Expand Network's Accelerator platform to help them with their WAN optimization needs.

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The Vanilla Soft page has a good article by Ken Murray on five things consider from an Inside Sales standpoint before plunking down money for CRM, SFA or telemarketing tools.

"For those of us that focus on Inside Sales, I think many of us would argue that CRM gives a lot of folks some snazzy reporting but does little to boost the productivity for our sales people," Murray says.

So if you are considering software for your Inside Sales team, here are Murray's five key questions to ask:

"What is your desired end state?  Visibility, reporting or more production from sales?" If it is a production boost you are seeking, I would shy away from traditional CRM and seek out platforms that increase the effectiveness of your sales team through enablers that power and increase their activity.  If your sales are fine and you are seeking a deeper understanding of the customer relationship, then CRM may hold the answer.

Read more here.

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Infor officials are touting Interaction Advisor, a component of their Infor CRM Epiphany suite, as an "easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use" packaged product "designed to meet the toughest demands of today's marketing and IT departments."

It's billed as a way to help companies "tap the potential of their existing customer base," and even as a way to double or even triple offer-acceptance rates and cross-sell revenue.

Earlier this year TMC's Deepika Mala reported that Infor introduced an enhanced version of its customer relationship management offering, Infor CRM Epiphany Outbound Marketing: "To optimize customer relationships by integrating marketing, sales, and service, the latest version of the product, using a 13 customer panel including Pier 1 for feedback, contains more than 39 feature enhancements."

Let us count the ways it helps businesses, according to a good, informative white paper on the subject:

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